General Information
This café is organised and hosted by Andreas Witt and Francesca Frontini. It aims at opening the discussion on the multilingual dimension of the CLARIN infrastructure.
Since English established its position as the universal language of science, scientific research, also in the field of language science, has become an increasingly monolingual endeavour. This phenomenon affects all research infrastructures, including CLARIN, where English is the working language and the language of most publications and resources.
However, as a language resources and technology infrastructure, CLARIN is language-neutral; it does not structurally privilege any language and remains usable for all languages. Indeed, CLARIN’s distributed network of data centres in over 20 countries offers language resources more than 1500 languages, which are made findable via the Virtual Language Observatory ( ). The fact that CLARIN centers host resources in, and tools for, a great variety of languages demonstrates that this approach has proven successful.
The CLARIN café “One infrastructure for many languages” will focus on the language-neutrality of CLARIN, zooming in on its various aspects and activities that support multilinguality, such as the Knowledge Infrastructure. In addition to this, the event will highlight other European projects and initiatives that address the diversity and richness of languages in Europe, such as the European Language Equality Project.
The café will also feature a presentation by the initiative European Federation of National Institutions for Language; the event will be concluded by a discussion panel where members of CLARIN Board of Directors and the National Coordinators Forum are present.
This first café is intended as a way to open up a broader discussion on the role of humanities infrastructures and CLARIN in particular for a Multilingual Europe in a world with thousands of languages, which will continue in the future with further events. We warmly invite national coordinators and researchers from CLARIN centres, as well as all interested researchers to join in and contribute with their insight in the conversation.
How to Join
Registration is closed.
Programme
14:00 - 14:10 Opening and CLARIN 101 - Francesca Frontini (ILC-CNR and CLARIN )
14:10 - 14:20 CLARIN as a Multilingual Infrastructure - Andreas Witt (IDS and CLARIN ERIC)
14:20 - 14:35 K-centres Under The Angle Of Multilinguality - Steven Krauwer (CLARIN ERIC)
14:35 - 14:50 The CKLD K-centre - Felix Rau (University of Cologne)
14:50 - 15:05 The European Language Equality Project (ELE) - Georg Rehm (DFKI)
15:05 - 15:20 The European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNL) - Sabine Kirchmeier (EFNIL, Deputy President)
15:20 - 15:30 Short coffee break
15:30 - 16:00 Panel discussion on "CLARIN, an infrastructure for a Multilingual Europe"
Panelists:
- Franciska de Jong (CLARIN ERIC)
- Jurgita Vaičenonienė (Vytautas Magnus University and CLARIN-LT)
- Sabine Kirchmeier (EFNIL, Deputy President)
- Georg Rehm (DFKI)